skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a consultant in the search space I always heard people ask “how can we be like Google”. It always felt wrongheaded of course. Essentially assuming cargo cultish practices of successful companies will lead to success.

So I think these stories are interesting but I take them with massive grains of salt. There’s randomness and luck. Theres the mix of personalities, and processes that fit this specific culture. There’s just timing. Success can be just as idiosyncratic as it is about drive or specific practices. And it’s hard to tease out WHICH practices actually contributed to success, and what might be holding this company back.

So I read these more for inspiration and entertainment. Not as a “X worked for Nvidia, so I should 100% do that” perspective.
Where does it say that anywhere in this study?

This study only concentrated on genetic signals found in Europe and parts of Western Asia.

Other sequences outside this range were not utilized.

More critically, I never bought the "Kalash are Greeks" origin story. It's a fairly common origin story all over the Northwest region of South Asia. There's a reason why the name "Sikandar" (Alexander) is extremely popular, and the Sikandar-Nama was written barely 300 miles away in Ghazni under Mahmud Ghazni's empire. And the "they have white skin" argument is dumb. There is a significant lack of genetic sequencing of Inner Asians, so a lot of the dataset just doesn't exist to make a claim one way or the other.
There is a Valve for music, it's called CD Baby. Ten bucks buys you instant distribution on all the platforms. That's as good as it gets for both producers and consumers.

http://cdbaby.com

It can't solve the problem of getting artists compensated because Americans do not value music. You yourself even expressed your own opinion of the lack of music's value. This is the fundamental reason why we've allowed Spotify to pocket 99% of the total value of music. If Americans valued music and the musicians that labor to make it more, they would care about artist compensation. But they don't, trusting the 'free' market to do it for them.
How a Global HashMap in AWS Lambda Made Our App Speak in Tongues
Throwaway accounts accusing anyone of amplifying anything is quite funny.
It was considered verbose years ago but now days it is IMHO better than messy C++ templates or Rust syntax.
Agree. You need to see it from the other side. Most likely, they are receiving 100+ applications, so the chance that your application will be seen is too low.
I'm at a point where I'm almost willing to ignore the first few days of applicants. They're all spray and pray junk. A week or two in and the applicant quality is significantly better.
He is by far the best in all formats but there is some luck in chess and the best player doesn't always win - like in most competitive games/sports.
Show HN: Browser extension to summarize HN comments – bring your own AI models
We’re George and Ann, and want to share a Hacker News specific browser extension that we have been working on.

We all love the rich discussions in HN, but navigating long posts with multiple threads can sometimes be challenging. You get lost in the depth and breadth of the discussion. There are a few AI-based summarization tools, but they typically focus on summarizing the article rather than the comments, and thus miss the essence of threaded discussions.

So, we built Hacker News Companion, a browser extension that makes it easy to navigate discussions and understand diverse viewpoints using AI tools of your choice. The goal is simple - make the comments the true hero in HN.

AI summaries for discussions
- Summarize any thread or full post
- See the key points, takeaways and notable quotes in summary panel
- Jump to specific threads from the summary with auto-generated backlinks - allowing you to re-engage in the discussion
- Bring your own AI models - local or cloud-based:
—- Local: Ollama with any local model (privacy-focused, runs locally)
—- Cloud: OpenAI/Claude - use your API key
—- Browser: Chrome's built-in AI powered by Gemini Nano

Vim-inspired keyboard navigation:
- Home row keys to move through posts and comments (home pages and comments page)
- j/k for next/previous, h/l for parent/child comments
- o to open posts, c for comments
- ? or / for all shortcuts, s to toggle the summary panel
- Navigate author comments: use [ and ] keys or arrow buttons next to username
- Hover usernames to see karma and profile info

Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPRh7UKYd8E

You can try it immediately by installing from Chrome Web Store https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-news-compani...

No signup needed. The extension preserves privacy (no analytics/tracking) and the code is open source - https://github.com/levelup-apps/hn-enhancer

Technical details - our learnings about summarizing threaded discussions and comparing the performance of various models are detailed in the project wiki [0].

Related HN discussions on this topic - A recent Show HN post on 'Bring-your-own-key browser extension for summarizing HN posts with LLMs' [1].

Try it out and let us know how it works for you. Would love your feedback and contributions!

[0] https://github.com/levelup-apps/hn-enhancer/wiki/HN-Companio...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42401227
Agreed. Both sides are bad. Most of these "bots" are useless and do a terrible job. I have seen that side as well. Many years ago, I was applying at IBM (don't ask) for a role and the recruiter told me that the online portal will reject me anyway. But not to worry because he knows what buttons to click to get me the interview because I was a really good fit.
There are many, search for jobs copilot or job application copilot.
> Fachkräftemangel

Why is this German word thrown in without any explanation? I’ve noticed this is a common trend whenever a Germany-adjacent topic is discussed.
> there is no company running absolutely anything on top of legion

Does Nvidia count?

Supercomputing is on the verge of a breakthrough—computing at the exascale, where a billion billion calculations per second will be the norm. That’s 10 times faster than current supercomputing speeds... Los Alamos scientists, along with colleagues at five other institutions (the Nvidia corporation, the University of California–Davis, Stanford University, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories) created a parallel programming system to do just that. The system, called Legion, sifts through an application to determine which tasks can run in parallel, or simultaneously, to save time and boost computing efficiency. [1]

> This is like saying a sketch of a car led to the car.

The ACM Turing Award (computer science equivalent of Nobel Prize) committee believes otherwise.

Beginning in the 1990s, he and his students extended the RenderMan shading language to work in real time on the newly available technology of graphical processing units (GPUs). The GPU programming languages that Hanrahan and his students developed led to the development of widely used standards, including the OpenGL shading language that revolutionized the production of video games. Subsequently, Hanrahan and his students developed Brook, a language for GPUs that eventually led to NVIDIA’s CUDA. The prevalence and variety of shading languages ultimately required the GPU hardware designers to develop more flexible architectures. These architectures, in turn, allowed the GPUs to be used in a variety of computing contexts, including running algorithms for high performance computing applications, and training machine learning algorithms on massive datasets for artificial intelligence applications. [2]

From SIGGRAPH 2004 slides, Stanford's research on Brook was sponsored by Nvidia, ATI, IBM, Sony, U.S. DARPA and DOE. [3]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20241212055421/https://www.lanl....

[2] https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/hanrahan_4652251.cfm

[3] https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/brookgpu/buck.Brook.pdf
Is that a good thing? Isn’t it better to have a strong opinion but be willing to change one’s mind?

As far as the topic goes, I think the main concern I have is that these policies support discriminatory hiring practices, which are illegal but common in companies wiTH DEI programs. I wish they would change their opinion to keep part of what they’re doing while getting rid of the explicitly discriminatory parts.
Tasteful and elegant, but somewhat thought provoking at the same time.
This extension is super easy to use: just click to start recording, interact normally, then click again to stop.
you can add albums to the queue. Have been able to for a long time.
Co-author here. Happy to answer any questions or take any feedback on this project.
I can’t stop other people doing this, and not doing it if other people are is a disadvantage for me. Imprisoned in a dilemma of our own making.
Most of the developers I know would be an impediment to any modern (or indeed pre-modern) military organization.
Something has to give. As a hiring manager I can’t filter through 100s of resumes or profiles.

Using all the top sites as well that are supposed to make the hiring process easier.
The "white males" bit is not useful/helpful. But US resident vs non is probably a bit.

There are several layers to this.

Layer one is that SW Eng work has always been both multi modal and that it's never been easy to get out of the trash distributions (e.g. $40-$60k "analyst" or "programmer" gigs, etc.) if you end up there. And it's also never been easy for someone to get a degree and find a job w/o having internships, years of part time work or other experience, or connections.

Anecdata, but a solid number of my CS graduating class more than a decade ago who were more than good enough to work in CS struggled to figure out how to find a first position if they didn't happen to have gotten internships, worked in the field before graduation, etc. While the best off got Google or MS internships that the majority of my class didn't even apply for. And even then, the majority of the jobs were for 4+ years of experience.

Add to this over the past decade many outfits have started to hire substantial numbers of overseas remote workers. For the most part, I think many companies fill their junior and slightly up roles with outside of the US remote workers. This has mixed results, but it's usually cheaper to hire several foreign remote workers over one domestic worker, and particularly in cases where time consuming grunt work is needed it can work reasonably. In some ways the H1-B doesn't matter because you can always hire remote foreign workers. The main issues I've seen relate to there being a substantial management load to deal with the amount of stuff lost in translation. I've personally had a better experience w/ South American contractors than Russian/Ukrainian/Slavic or Indian, I think because the timezones match better, English/Spanish/Portuguese seems to be easier to navigate linguistically, and the workers have seemed to better understand what we've needed and been better at showing initiative for some reason.

Then layer AI on top of this and relatively reduced hiring.

I do not think it's a good time to be looking for work, and with every year that's gone by over the least decade it's been worse for junior/early career roles especially.

I haven't seen white males being let go in favor of foreigners, but I have seen a lot of limiting hiring to a few seniors and filling the rest with overseas to save money. AI is only exacerbating. As is the fact that nobody really seems to have money for hiring. So is the desire to hire people who are magically already perfect and spun up for a role, no matter how niche.

In general, I think "white male" is a red herring.
Are communities based on circumstances of birth more important than those based on personal choices? If you can choose your religion and profession, why not also citizenship? Of course there can be reasonable requirements, but it's clear how an individualist and a collectivist would answer.
I haven't been able to get a job since the pandemic.

The problem is that I work best as a lone wolf, and that's not how software is done nowadays. For good reason, I might add, so I am not complaining.

Don't make my mistake and learn your soft skills.

https://gavinhoward.com/2024/06/my-programming-journey/
I wouldn't believe how well it was run if I wasn't there. Sacha is a powerhouse, the amount of code she wrote in elisp to make this conference happen with the quality it did is just amazing.

Thanks Sacha!
NASA to Prepare Astronauts for Lighting Conditions Around the Lunar South Pole
Bird flu becomes an epidemic. A hundred cases in Q1

More models enter the AR glasses market. Ray-Ban Meta gains an AR display, a minimalist Orion. More market adoption spread out across different manufacturers

Gen AI products become really sticky. Like daily use. eCommerce product recommendations. The power consumption drives more Big Tech to invest in nuclear energy (SMRs). COP30 sees even less government participation. Google Cloud continues attracting more startups across the US & UK with its scalable gen AI infrastructure.

Some AI companies jack up their prices after gaining a critical mass of user base (Meta’s Llama)

More AI deployed in more Tech co.s like , replacing more jobs - customer service, transaction compliance, outbound sales.

More mental health awareness with social media use. Hopefully more AI or protective measures deployed against active shooters, ie, ZeroEyes.

More DEI in the arts - Hollywood, music, publishing.

Some sort of immigration crackdown. Trump will need to clarify his stance between Musk’s policies & his MAGA old guard. He & Musk fall out at some point

The Russia-Ukraine war ends via attrition. Maybe Israel too
Really good point. But the issue is that some job sites (indeed for example) wants you to pay to play. If you reduce the sponsorship or daily cost, the resume count also goes down. But regardless, I have seen the same. 1st few days are nightmare. I am 1 week into the job posting and have 500+ resumes. This after I have rejected at least 100 already. Madness.
The point in having the International Agreements is indeed to honor it.

But only as long and as fully as is possible in the real world

When bad actors deliberately refuse to live within the agreements, e.g., Putin, who has broken nearly EVERY agreement he signed, there are only two choices. Push back with force, or surrender.

At the end of the day, the agreements work to prevent war, but only so long as everyone agrees to be bound by them. When one party unilaterally decides to break out and try to take territory and rule by deception and force, if we fail to respond, the agreements all become moot; the facts on the ground will be that the one who broke the agreements owns and rules everything.

It's brutal, but the agreements exist only as long as everyone follows them.
Fedora's Captivating 2024 with Many New Features and Leading Innovations
I’m 65 and I have tenure. If I didn’t, I would leave the country. If I couldn’t, I don’t know what I would do. You do not want to be on the open market in the 2020s, that’s for sure.

it is nearly impossible for people with CS degrees (especially white males) to get an interview let alone a job.

My friend, if you think it’s bad for white men, just wait till you hear what it’s like for black women. 2+ year job searches, for black tech workers, were the norm even in the pre-COVID economy.

It’s terrible for everyone who isn’t in a position to take advantage of geographic arbitrage. And even that, for a worker, is unstable… look at how fast the bastards RTO’d people as soon as their real estate holdings took a hit.
I’m genuinely wondering why you would chose VSC over emacs. Granted, I’m on doom emacs and it’s mainly because I’m too lazy to config Neovim, so it’s not like I’m really a purist. I even use VSC occasionally when I’m in a context on my lovely windows work computers where I don’t have access to WSL, but it’s such a horrible experience. It’s slow, the plugins are ass and the LSPs are horrible for basically anything which isn’t Typescript.

I don’t even think VSC is “that” bad despite what I made it sound like, but it’s probably as temporary as any other modern IDE. In a few years “every” VSC user will probably have moved on to Zed. Meanwhile your emacs (or vim) dot files will setup the only IDE you’ve ever used on any machine.
The market definitely sucks in EU too. A couple of years ago I could choose where to work as a junior dev. These days as a senior I'm happy to cling into my current job, and probably couldn't find anything if I got laid off.

Fresh grads in most other fields aren't doing either, but at least they aren't oversaturated as badly as CS is. Only ones doing fine are medical and social work professionals.
Yes but now you need these agencies to prescreen for you which is a very expensive and time consuming process. Also, I have used some before and not all agencies are worth the time or money. Most of them are glorified Keyword scanners.
Freenet / Hyphanet 1499 released: privacy, networking, CSS, UX, cleanups
Then you have radio equipment in addition to an independent diesel generator and fuel to explain…

Yes it was a tanker. The bigger the ship doesn’t mean it has more people or more power generation like a cruise ship. A tanker has a crew of 4 plus captain, maybe?
Add a tiny captcha-like task that takes a real candidate who read the job ad 20 seconds to do, but won’t get done by spray and pray candidates.
I think every Dutchie who moans about their trains needs to spend a month in the UK LOL. I'm jealous of Dutch trains!

4 hour journey in peak time from Maastricht to Gronigen for 30 EUR without advance purchase? Incredible.

40% discount in off-peak times and weekends for 67 EUR/year? Bargain. We have a 33% discount option which is available to everyone but it is only for trains in the south of England (there lots of others for young people, elderly people, disabled people etc)

Very, very simple fare system in comparison to ours.

Great connections from Schipol.

I know it's not perfect - there are strikes, very busy trains etc.
From an entirely armchair commentator, I think so - the exchange of ideas and enthusiasm among Emacs-likes can only benefit both projects and Lisp-based editors in general. (The reason I’m very armchair is because use LyX when I want to write technical documents, which does leave out one of TeXmacs’s really important use cases.)
Spotify are busy pushing consumers towards ‘Made for Spotify’ music that they don’t beed to pay royalties on

https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
Ross Douthat's tweet linked to in TFA is far more nuanced AND concise, maybe switch the link to
https://x.com/DouthatNYT/status/1872341885790126252

>The American Way is a complex jock-nerd dialectic (see e.g. our way of war or the Apollo Project) not some sort of drama of the diligent and gifted nerd simply overcoming jockish ignorance and sloth
I had to look it up; for others, it means "skilled worker shortage".
There is plenty of discussion about how hard it is to get or change jobs in tech (even with several years of experience) in the r/womenintech subreddit, along with some discussion about what other industries to potentially pursue instead.
That something is hiring a recruitment consultant.
I've been at the receiving end of ageism, and what i now do is drop off some of the older experience(s) from my resume, etc. Also, i try to avoid listing my graduation year from university. Some people suggest even if not fighting off ageism, its only relevant to list the last decade of experience on a resume anyway...so if i ever get questioned, i'd use that as an excuse...but, my strategy is simply to get my foot in the door to an interview without getting caught by the "age police" in HR. (If someone thinks that there's no such thing as a sort of filter - what i called "age police" - within HR, then you have wool over your eyes.)

So, my suggestion is maybe there's not a need to create a fake profile, but maybe trim yours a bit. Good luck!
People living in central/western Europe: You have no idea how fortunate you are to be able to hop on a train and ride to another major city in a few hours.
We mortals of the southeastern Europe feel detached from the rest of the world.

Yeah, I know German trains occasionally are late, but I remember standing on the platform in Munich, envying those who could travel to Madrid or Brussels without going to the airport—security checks, yada.
Congrats on your privileged position! I'm glad you are able to retire, but not sure this is the best time to crow about it.

I'm trying to eke out enough money to put in my 401K and hope that when it's time for me to retire in a few decades, I'll have enough to scrape by on and the economy hasn't exploded by then and render my investments worthless.
I’m somewhat dubious that healthcare is the biggest impediment to doing a startup today, because of the Affordable Care Act. It certainly seems to have helped supercharge the “FIRE” (financial independence, retire early) movement—another set of working-age people who need healthcare without employment.

I think a lot of engineers just want to engineer. Leading a startup quickly becomes mostly business stuff like finance, marketing, sales, hiring, etc. You need a business model, not just tech know-how. Starting your own business is definitely not the same job as staff engineer at an established business. It’s not for everyone.
It seems that many processes, from interviews to real work, are increasingly manipulated. I've noticed a pattern with candidates employed by certain consulting companies, especially in Texas and New Jersey. These companies often recruit low-cost labor from India, craft fake resumes, and submit them to platforms like LinkedIn.

During interviews, candidates use tools like HDMI dual-screen setups, ChatGPT, Otter AI, or Fathom AI to cheat and secure jobs. These consulting firms even fabricate green card verifications and other documents, enabling them to crack most interviews unless the candidate is exceptionally unskilled.

Once hired, these companies often delegate the actual work to individuals in India, paying them as little as $500 while profiting $4,000–$5,000 per month from the arrangement.

We uncovered this issue when we began conducting on-site interviews. While these candidates can handle medium-level LeetCode problems during virtual evaluations, they struggle with basic tasks, like implementing a LinkedList or solving simple LeetCode problems, in person.

Alarmingly, these consulting companies are becoming more sophisticated over time. This raises a critical question: how can genuinely experienced candidates compete in such a landscape?
What happens when you get an interview and spend time for a company you don't want to work for?
Matt has been very clear that he's attempting to use the trademark as a bludgeon to get WP Engine to "give back" (whatever that means). There was no contract ahead of time that required anyone to give back, and the trademark policy has for more than a decade condoned WP Engine's usage as an explicit permission. All the written communication has always been in favor of WP Engine's rights to use all the IP exactly as they have been with no obligation to do anything, yet Matt has decided that he's owed something.

Red Hat, meanwhile, puts a clause into a written contract that says that they will continue to provide support as long as you don't forward what they give you to other people.

We can get into debates all day long about which one is truer to the "spirit of Open Source" or some such philosophical abstraction, but one of the two organizations we're talking about put their expectations for compensation into a detailed written contract and the other, to put it generously, didn't.
How are you going to fit 671 billion parameters into 64 + 16 gigs of RAM? That's less than one bit per parameter.
What's SAP? (2019)
JetBrains IDEs are highly extensible, and they have support for AI completions. Nevertheless, I think that the assistance and navigation features in IDEs are much more useful than auto-generating half-broken code.